Democrat - media "killing our troops"

1. I never stated or implied that anyone who was against the war or criticizes the admins rebuilding plans is an "America Hater." Personally, I was against the war at the time and in the manner it was carried out, but once we committed, I think we have an obligation to stick it out and do it right. Personally, I think the administration could be doing a better job than they have to date in rebuilding Iraq, but much of the criticism in the press is overblown. My main b**** is that everyone is so impatient. Some on this board seem to take pride and glee in pointing out every time we make a mistake. I think that's sad.

2. Actually, if you were paying any attention, you would note that I started the thread "Affirmative Action Reconsidered." So your analogy makes no sense, applied to me.

3. Just so you're clear, I distrust people who can't think for themselves. The "America Haters" who think we can do nothing right, that all we want is Iraq's oil, Bush never does anything right, ad nauseum. On the other side, the Bush/Rumsfeld/Ashcroft apologists who think any criticism of our government or their policies is unpatriotic make me wanna puke. Several posters on this D&D forum are poster children for both these kinds of morons. You can figure out for yourself if you are one of them.

 

1. legitimate

2. I know, it wasn't meant to be applied specifically to you; it was a rhetorical question; I was pointing out that being called an america hater is patently offensive, and just unneccessary. Osama bin Laden is an america hater. Wesley Clark, Howard Dean, Dennis Kuchinich, Ariana Huffington, Ted Turner, Pat Buchanan, Brent Skowcroft, MacBeth, GreenVegan, glynch are concerned citizens.

3. good.

 

Go ahead show the bad...Do it!, but show the good at least 50% of the time, at least that's fair...I haven't seen half and half and I think this should be an agenda to affirmitize the bias...

but you know what? ...This still isn't fair, because I dare contend there is so much, much, much more good stories compared to the bad in reality. Imagine how many thousands upon thousands of innocent Iraqi children's lives have so much more promise and enlightenment! I could imagine the stories would be incalcuable...

I salute the U.S. soldier who has determined this is worth it! God bless them all and the Iraqi people...

 

I think the issue is that the media is only reporting the bad news. This is some of the first good news that I've heard. I'm dying to hear about exactly what we're doing for the Iraqi people, yet reports make it seem like we make no progress AT ALL.

Maybe gloom and doom sells.

 

I just want to bring this one back up. It seems that this story is finally starting to make the news. Note that this is what I have been saying for quite a while...

Science & Society 10/6/03
By John Leo
The truth, the whole truth

If you rely on newspapers and tv networks for your news, chances are you have no idea that the controversial performance of western reporters in Iraq is emerging as a big issue. The mainstream media have virtually ignored the stunning charges made by John Burns, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times. But those charges are all over the Internet and carried by Fox News and conservative commentators.

In the new book Embedded, Burns says the vast majority of correspondents in prewar Iraq played ball with Saddam Hussein and downplayed the viciousness of the regime. He says Iraq was "a grotesque charnel house" and a genuine threat to America, but to protect their access, the reporters did not tell the truth. Burns names no names (he should now), but he is particularly contemptuous of the BBC and CNN.

Burns's comments are echoed by those of U.S. District Court Judge Don Walter of Shreveport, La. This is another Internet-only story that you aren't likely to find in newspapers. Walter was vehemently antiwar but changed his mind after an assignment in Iraq as a U.S. adviser on Iraq's courts. He says we should have invaded sooner to halt the incredible butchery and torture that the United Nations, France, and Russia knew all about and were quite willing to tolerate. And he is distressed by the reporting on Iraq now: "The steady drip, drip, drip of bad news may destroy our will to fulfill the obligations we have assumed. WE ARE NOT GETTING THE WHOLE TRUTH FROM THE NEWS MEDIA." (Capitals are his.)

Some members of Congress are sounding the same theme. Georgia Democrat Jim Marshall says negative media coverage is getting our troops in Iraq killed and encouraging Baathist holdouts to think they can drive the United States out. Marshall, a Vietnam vet, said there is "a disconnect between the reporting and the reality," partly because the 27 reporters left in Iraq are "all huddled in a hotel."

Marshall and a bipartisan group of six other representatives just returned from Iraq. The lawmakers charged that reporters have developed an overall negative tone and a "police blotter" mind-set stressing attacks and little else. Ranking member Ike Skelton, a Missouri Democrat, said he found the creativeness and flexibility of the U.S. forces impressive, including their 3,100 projects in northern Iraq, from soccer fields to schools to refineries, "all good stuff, and that isn't being reported."

The campaign for more balance in Iraq reporting has been driven by Internet bloggers, notably Andrew Sullivan (AndrewSullivan.com) and law Prof. Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee (Instapundit.com). Reynolds deplores "the lazy Vietnam-templating, the `of course America must be losing' spin, the implicit and sometimes explicit sneer."

Safer. Both Reynolds and Sullivan encourage U.S. soldiers and others in Iraq to send in their own reports, which have generally been positive and hopeful. "I don't trust most of the journalists, I'm afraid," Sullivan wrote in a July appeal for firsthand accounts. Letters home from Iraq are now regularly put up on the Internet. One last week from Senior Chief Petty Officer Art Messer of the Navy Seabees said: "The countryside is getting more safe by the day despite all the attacks you are hearing about. Imagine if every shooting incident or robbery committed in Los Angeles was blown out of proportion."

The Internet campaign is another example of the new media going around the old media, in this case to counter stories by quagmire-oriented reporters. Perhaps goaded by Internet coverage, USA Today became the first mainstream outlet (as far as I can see) to highlight problems in current Iraq coverage. A strong article last week by Peter Johnson quoted this from MSNBC's Bob Arnot in Iraq: "I contrast some of the infectious enthusiasm I see here with what I see on TV, and I say, `Oh, my God, am I in the same country?' " time magazine's Brian Bennett added: "What gets in the headlines is the American soldier getting shot, not the American soldiers rebuilding a school or digging a well." Bennett says the violence and threats are real, but so are growing signs of stability in Iraqi life, with restaurants reopening every day and women feeling increasingly safe on the street.

Columnist Tom Friedman of the New York Times says he is a "worried optimist" who thinks things in Iraq are not as good as they should be by now but not as bad as they seem from afar. That view might be a starting point for the big media to discuss how the "look from afar" got so skewed.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031006/opinion/6john.htm

 

No, I will not let this one fade away.

HIDDEN STORIES OF IRAQ
Hunting for the 'good stuff' is worth it

Two competing story lines have emerged in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein. Let's call the first one “Quagmire.” The second might be titled “Iraq's Glass is Half-Full.”

By and large, “Quagmire” is told by the large print news organizations and the TV folks.

“Half-Full” is mainly found on the Internet, although many of the links available lead to articles in the conventional media. For interested readers, a good place to begin broadening your view of the Iraq story is www.instapundit.com, a spritely Web log run by University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds. Instapundit is chock-full of firsthand accounts, story excerpts and links to other articles.

Which story line is the “correct” one? With Iraq's future hanging in the balance, it's impossible to say. Both versions have a certain validity; neither offers a complete picture by itself.

Obviously, if the bombings and attacks can't be curbed, pacifying Iraq will be a lot tougher.

Still, I'm betting on the more hopeful view, the cautious optimism of “Half-Full.” In fact, there are increasing signs of a backlash against “Quagmire” — a sense that the pessimism has been overdone.

Troops e-mailing their families or interviewed by hometown papers often express amazement at the dissimilarity between what they see and what the media emphasize. They ask, Where are the stories about schools reopened, city councils established, infrastructure repaired?

“To hear the media tell it, America has done nothing to improve…security, and the Iraqi public is volatile and seeking revenge,” Eric Knapp, a Marine stationed in Najaf, wrote recently in a New York Post article linked to Instapundit.

“We are not getting the whole truth from the news media,'' writes Donald E. Walter, a federal judge from Louisiana who spent three months in Iraq evaluating the country's justice system. “The news you watch, listen to and read is highly selective.” Walter's musings also appeared in The New York Post.

Another Instapundit link led to a story in The Hill, a newspaper that covers Congress, quoting lawmakers who recently toured Iraq and offered a similar response. One was Democratic Rep. Ike Skelton of Missouri, who mentioned 3,100 projects — soccer fields, schools rebuilt, refineries repaired — completed in northern Iraq by Army troops.

The “good stuff,” says Skelton, is not being reported.

Many Iraq stories imply that we're in a race against time. We must pacify the country before the Iraqis lose patience and rise up against the occupiers.

Iraq shares this parallel with Vietnam: If a Tet-style offensive occurs, meaning a massive, coordinated attack by guerillas, it could have a similar effect on U.S. public opinion. The Tet Offensive took place in early 1968. It was a battlefield disaster for the Viet Cong but a strategic defeat for the United States. It convinced American public opinion that Vietnam was unwinnable.

The real race against time, then, is not in Iraq. It's in the United States, and excessively pessimistic media coverage will make it tougher to win that race.

“This is not a people for whom it is a brand new experience to lose power and be without water,'' says Karl Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute, who recently published a book on his experience as an “embedded” journalist with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division. (Zinsmeister will visit Fort Leavenworth and Whiteman Air Force Base on Saturday to promote his book, Boots on the Ground.)

“I have never seen a rattier, run-down country, and I've been all over Africa,” Zinsmeister said. “The population has been abused over a long time. They probably have a lot more patience than we're guessing.”

This is not to suggest that the Bush administration's postwar approach should be immune from criticism, or that Iraq's road to stability will be an easy one, or that reporters should ignore attacks and downplay casualties.

But in journalism, the first and most important decision is how a story is defined, and many in the media seem to have defined Iraq in a way that discounts facts that are an important part of the story. Worse, by occasionally implying that disaster is virtually inevitable, some reporters are undermining our resolve, which could make it harder to do what's needed to make Iraq a stable democracy. “Quagmire,” in other words, could become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Consider this report last month on an attack on a pipeline in northern Iraq, by CBS's Kimberly Dozier, as transcribed by the Media Research Center.

The attack, she said, “…added to a growing sense of frustration among top brass here that no measure is enough to protect their soldiers or Iraq's resources…Ordinary Iraqis blame Americans for not fixing the damage fast enough, even as the soldiers are risking their lives to do it…America has made new enemies. They're chanting the name of that old foe, Saddam Hussein, and vowing to attack Americans everywhere.”

This was so over-the-top that CBS anchor Dan Rather reminded viewers that TV “sometimes has trouble with perspective, so you may want to note that in some areas of Iraq, things are peaceful.”

Thanks, Dan. Of course, anyone with a computer and Internet access probably knew that already.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar/news/opinion/6892716.htm

 

Or a member of the Democratic Party.